To see history happening around us is a unique opportunity. Not always a pleasant one, but a unique one. And in 2017 we all got the chance to witness and grow together.

As the world changed around us, we changed with it. We grew stronger, we grew angrier, and we grew braver. With all the bad that has happened throughout the year, it can become easy to forget the good. The queer people who have been making history every day in the best possible ways.

For example, queer media has rocked our world this year.

With Hexer coming out with its pilot episode, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, One Day at a Time, and Master of None bringing some of the best coming out episodes we have seen, we can’t help but feel surrounded with people who look like us. And it seems, maybe, finally, our stories are being told.

We were also given the opportunity to embrace some amazing queer female icons this year with Hayley Kiyoko, and Ke$ha bringing us new songs and new loves. Opening up new narratives around queerness and womanhood that we haven’t seen so frankly drawn in mainstream media before.

Politically it has obviously been a mixed bag, but we have talked all through the year about the bad, we would love a second to discuss the good. A great place to start would be Australia, which has just won marriage equality and removed the need for transgender teens to go to family court before starting hormone treatment. In American, we had the victory of Virginia’s Danica Roem, who will become the first openly transgender person to be seated in a U.S. state legislature when she takes office in January. We saw Slovenia, Germany, Malta, Taiwan, and Austria all reach marriage equality, giving us a reminder of the light that still shines in the international community.

In cinema, Moonlight led the way in becoming the first queer movie to win Best Picture in the Academy Awards. Movies like Carmilla, Call me by Your Name, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, and God’s Own Country came out and regardless of personal preferences, they added new and fresh names into our minds and screens.

More than anything else we grew this year. We grew in numbers of people on the street, we grew in awareness, we grew in media, and we grew together. We took a year that threw every terrible thing it could at us and we made art, we made a community, we made it great.

So thank you. If no one has told you this yet, or even if they have, thank you. Thank you for staying around another year, thank you for growing with us, thank you for making history with us.